


I Am A Visitor Here, I Am Not Permanent

by Smokeycut



Category: X-Men
Genre: F/F, Slap Slap Kiss, coming home, mountains of sexual tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-05 00:23:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15852474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smokeycut/pseuds/Smokeycut
Summary: Marrow comes back to the Jean Grey School for the first time since she was a teenager herself. Kitty isn't sure what the Morlock's aims are, but she may have more to do with Marrow's return than she thinks. Will Marrow find a reason to stay? Or will she leave all over again?





	I Am A Visitor Here, I Am Not Permanent

**Author's Note:**

> I know this pairing isn't the most popular, but it's one that I like a lot, and I figure there have to be at least a few fans of it out there. I hope you like it!

Marrow stood on the front step of the school, fist raised, but hesitant to knock. She wanted to, she very much did. But at the same time, her entire body was screaming at her to turn on her heel and run away and never ever look back. She attempted to bargain with herself. After a minute or so, the warring halves of Sarah came to an agreement. She would knock on the door, but if nobody answered, she would leave. No ringing the doorbell, no repeated knocks, nothing more than the agreed upon amount of effort.

She took a breath and rapped the back of her fist against the door three times. The door was answered by a teenaged girl with silver skin and bright red hair. She looked Marrow up and down, and then turned her head and shouted down the hall.

"SOME KIND OF BONE LADY IS AT THE FRONT DOOR! FRIEND OR FOE?!"

From down the hall, Marrow could hear the faint sound of someone yelling back. Shortly after, a woman with curly brown hair screeched to a halt at the door and looked out to see Marrow standing awkwardly, an olive green duffel bag at her feet. This one, Marrow recognized. Kitty. She remembered the pretty Kitty. How could she forget the first girl she had ever crushed on?

"S-Sarah? What are you doing here?" Kitty asked, obviously shocked at Marrow's presence. "Oh, Cessily, you can run on to your next class. I'll take it from here," Kitty told the girl, who promptly shrugged her shoulders and walked off with a classmate, who appeared to be made of diamond.

"This was a bad idea," Marrow muttered under her breath. She went to turn away, but Kitty simply walked through her and confronted her, arms crossed, on the other side. 

"Are you looking for a place to stay?" Kitty asked, a bit calmer. The sympathy tugged at Sarah's heartstrings, while the pity made her growl deep in her throat. 

"Heard there was a new school," she admitted, rubbing her arm and picking at a budding bone fragment. "People always said I had a place to stay at the old one, just wondered if that still applied. I'll get outta your hair, kitty cat," she said, going to walk through Kitty, only to be stopped by a tangible hand pushing against her chest. Her hearts skipped a beat at the contact.

"You do," Kitty told her with a smile. "Everyone does. C'mon inside, okay? We can talk about getting you set up here again. I doubt Logan would object to you becoming faculty. You guys always had a rapport, didn't you?"

"More like we stabbed each other a bunch," Sarah said with a snort. 

"You _were_ kind of violent back when we were teenagers, huh? Er, still are, from what I hear, actually," Kitty said. She found the whole situation awkward, and Sarah could feel it. Boy could she feel it. She felt it so deep it made her hearts sink.

"Maybe I haven't changed, maybe I have," Marrow said, glaring at Kitty with a mixture of envy and bitterness and lust. "But you're just as much of a pretty, pampered little kitten as I remember you were."

Kitty went to respond to the slight, but stopped herself. Instead, she just put on her fakest smile and walked back inside, beckoning Sarah to follow. Going against the part of herself that screamed to be alone and away from anyone who might care about her, she did, duffel bag in hand. They went down a few hallways, and Sarah watched with a small sense of pride as students walked by, babbling excitedly with their friends. Students of all shapes and colors, with mutations of any kind. 

She remembered what it was like when she had attended the school. It felt like a lifetime ago. She had been one of the only ones who couldn't pass for human, no matter what she did. She remembered yelling her head off at Xavier for only taking the "pretty" Mutants until she came along. Mutants like Kitty. Pretty pretty Kitty. She shook the thought out of her head and glared at the back of Kitty's head. She wished she could just grab her and yank her beautiful brown hair, stroke her soft cheeks, and...

Kitty stopped her when they reached a door marked "Headmasters' Office", and ushered her inside. There were a pair of desks in the office. One was empty, while Logan sat with his feet propped up on the other. He looked up from some paperwork and saw Kitty, then did a double take upon realizing who was with her. 

"Long time no see, kid," he said. Like Kitty at first, he seemed to be a bit thrown off by her presence, but quickly moved past it. He pulled his feet off the desk and stood up as Kitty shut the door behind them. 

"She just showed up at the front door," Kitty explained calmly, as if her heart wasn't still beating faster than normal from the anxiety of having someone as unpredictable and violent and _intimidating_ as Sarah right beside her. But strangely still, Kitty was doing her best to welcome her with open arms. "I told her that she's still welcome here after all these years, but I figured it's a decision that _both_ headmasters should be involved in."

"Don't see why I can't just grab an empty room and be done with it," Sarah huffed. 

"Cuz this is a school, first and foremost," Logan said. "Things were different back in the old days, after Zero Tolerance. A kid like you could just show up, move into the danger room, and start fightin' sentinels back then. These kids ain't fightin' anymore."

"They don't learn to scrap, they're just gonna die," Sarah shot back with a sneer.

"They know how to defend themselves. We teach them how to do that much. But we aren't sending them off to kill and die. If you're on board with that, I don't got no problem with you sticking around. If not, you can go back to X-Force, or whoever it is you were running with." 

Logan and Sarah stared each other down for a few moments, the tension in the room seeming to rise with every passing second. Kitty's sense of impending doom and flying bones grew... Only to vanish entirely when Sarah broke out into a toothy grin and shook Logan's hand. 

"Deal, shorty," she said. "I'll play by your rules."

"Oh thank goodness," Kitty sighed. She bounced back almost right away, and placed a hand on Sarah's shoulder, in the space between two protruding bone spikes. "I can set you up with a room in just a few minutes. We've got a lot of extra space, just in case of situations like these. Oh! You used to write sometimes, right?" she asked, recalling past collaborations between Sarah and Piotr in the forms of writing and art. 

"Yeah... Why?"

"The students have been interested in a creative writing course, but we didn't have a teacher until now," Kitty explained jovially. 

"You want me to be a _what_?" Sarah blanched.

"Welcome aboard, darlin'," Logan said with a smug grin. "You start on Monday."

**************************************************************************

Marrow curled up in her bed. She looked across the room, over the foot of her bed, and into the closet. The doors were wide open, giving a perfectly clear view of what hung inside. The clothes that she had brought with her, a few suits that Kitty had insisted she take in case she needed to look presentable to the parents of students, and a uniform. It was green and grey, mostly. A pair of emerald colored pants, with a matching green sleeveless hoodie that had a large grey X symbol across it's chest and looping around to form another X on it's back. 

They had supplied her with it after it came to light that she hadn't had a proper uniform since she was a teenager. They whipped it up rather quickly, with her preferences on the design taken into account. She hadn't tried it on yet, and she wasn't sure if or when she ever would. Didn't really matter much to her either way. At least, that's what she told herself. She didn't want to admit that there was an actual reason she had come back to the school. She tried to convince herself that it was just a desire to be around her own kind again, or that she needed a place to stay after leaving X-Force. That it wasn't at all because she missed her family. That her hearts didn't crack open and go all soft and gooey when she saw the people she used to spend Christmas sharing presents with, or that she wanted to hug that costume close to her chest and wear the X again. It wasn't that at all. Obviously.

And it most certainly wasn't the fact that the moment she saw Kitty's face in the front doorway, her hearts began pounding in her chest like a damned drum set and her cheeks went red and she remembered her first real crush and those feelings of desire and awkward, confusing lust came rushing back. Not that at all. 

With a frustrated sigh, Sarah laid back in bed, and pulled the covers up over herself. She may not have been sure what the hell she was going to do about her apparent new teaching position, or her renewed spot on the X-Men, but she did know what she was going to do about her little kitten problem. She smiled to herself as she recalled one very important detail of her meeting with Logan earlier in the day. She had demanded that he give her a specific bedroom, and he signed off on it with little more than a shrug and a small laugh. 

She pressed the back of her head against the wall behind her bed. The walls of the mansion were thin enough that she could hear what was going on in the room next to her's. Kitty was listening to music. It was nice music. Gentle and soothing, with a harsh dose of melancholy. Just like the way that Kitty made her feel when she looked at her.

"Nighty night, kitty cat," Sarah whispered as she shut her eyes. "Sleep tight. Don't let the bed brood bite."

*********************************************************************

Kitty woke up with a start. For some strange reason, she felt like there was someone there with her, watching over her. A cursory glance over her bedroom told her that she was alone, but the feeling kept nagging at her. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and checked the clock on her phone. She woke up an hour earlier than usual. It was still dark out, too. She crawled her way out of bed and phased herself out of her bed clothes as she walked to her closet. She kept thinking about the previous day as she buttoned up her shirt. 

The last person she expected to turn up on the doorstep _had_ , and she still wasn't sure how she felt about it all. She had never quite managed to pin down whether she liked Marrow or hated her back when they were teenagers. Last she had heard, Sarah was running with Hope and Psylocke in some X-Force outfit, and that was after several years of nobody having seen her. Then she just shows up, out of the blue, looking for a place to stay? Just like that? 

And of course, she had to show up looking like _that_. Sure, Kitty had thought Sarah had a strange, awkward kind of beauty about her when they were younger. Like an ugly duckling. But then she had to grow up to become some kind of badass punk with a deep, husky voice and a newfound confidence and swagger that made Kitty feel all nervous and shy. How dare she just show up and... And give her that smoldering look? She doubted that Sarah even realized she was doing it, and that made it so much _worse_.

She was already driving Kitty completely nuts, and she hadn't even been there for a full day. What a bitch. What a weird, intimidating, frustratingly attractive bitch. 

Kitty scowled and turned back to make her bed, but realized what she had missed on her earlier scan over the room. There was a letter on her bed. She didn't even want to think about who snuck into her bedroom while she was asleep, though she had a pretty good idea. Sarah never was good at understanding personal boundaries. She looked it over still, but not without scowling even harder to show her disapproval. 

But as she read it over, that scowl faded. She touched her free hand to her chest, just over her heart, and her breath hitched at the words that had been written.

_There once was a girl. Awkward and lanky and built all wrong and jumbled. She was all lost and alone, until the day that she was brought into a beautiful home filled with beautiful people. And although the girl spat venom and started fights, they still saw the best in her. One girl, the most beautiful among the beautiful, saw past all the ugly parts and confused anger, and she told the lost girl that she was beautiful too. But the lost girl didn't believe her._

_In the end, that lost girl ran away, too confused and scared of the acceptance that she had been faced with. People moved on. The beautiful girl grew up. Became a beautiful woman. And the lost woman became more and more lost with each passing year. It took her a long, long time, but eventually she realized that she couldn't be alone forever. That the only truly ugly parts of her were, in fact, the loneliness and the lack of trust that she wrapped herself in like a ratty old blanket. She realized that she had to come home. She had to learn to be a person again._

_The lost woman came back home, even though she was scared. It's hard for her to open up, and she knows it. It's hard for her to trust, and to be honest about how she feels. The truth is, she's afraid of rejection, and so she runs away before anyone gets the chance to push her away. But she wants to let people in again. She wants to be honest about how she feels. And this... This is what the lost young woman wants to say._

_"I have loved you longer than I've loved myself."_

"Damnit, Sarah," Kitty said under her breath. She set the letter down on her bedside table before phasing through the door and heading for the kitchen. She badly needed a cup of coffee.

*********************************************************************

Kitty cupped her mug with both hands and sighed deeply. There was nobody in the teacher’s lounge except for her. There likely wouldn’t be for a few hours, given that it was a Saturday. She stared into the dark brown drink and mulled over the letter that Sarah had left for her. She knew that _she_ was attracted to the Morlock, but that was just physical attraction, nothing more. She was attracted to a lot of women. It didn’t mean anything unless she made it mean anything. 

But it meant something to Sarah. The more that Kitty thought about the letter, the more she replayed the heartfelt confession, the more that her own heart started to crumble. Kitty sipped at her coffee silently. 

“Why did this have to happen to me?” she groaned. 

She didn’t have a clue as to how she had managed to survive living in the same mansion as Sarah back when they were teenagers. The woman was so _frustrating_. She was hot headed, rude, violent, pigheaded, arrogant, kind of disgusting, and just… Maddening, in every possible way. And yet Kitty didn’t hate her for any of it. No, instead, Kitty actually felt for the pink-haired maniac. 

The worst part was, she could actually picture it. It could never be normal, certainly not. Then again, her life was hardly ever normal anyways. She could see herself actually _being_ with Sarah. Drinking coffee together in the morning, before they had to teach their classes. Going out to grab lunch in the city on their days off, and getting into fights with bigots within minutes. Marathoning Star Wars on the weekends, so that Sarah could finally get another glimpse of the normalcy that Kitty grew up with. Visiting the Morlock tunnels, and meeting all of Sarah’s old friends properly, without being kidnapped by them. 

Yeah. She could see it.

“Guten morgen, Katzchen!” Kurt said in a sing-song tone as he bamfed his way onto the countertop. She would have leapt right out of her skin, if she hadn’t become desensitized to it over the past eleven years. 

“Hey, Kurt,” Kitty said flatly. She took another sip of coffee, then set her mug down on the counter and looked at the fuzzy blue elf. If there was anyone she could talk to about what was going on…

“So I’m pretty sure that by the end of today, I’m going to have to decide whether or not to make out with Marrow.”

“...I see.” He blinked.

“She told me she was in love with me, but I haven’t gotten a chance to talk to her about it yet. The thing is, I kind of want to strangle her, but I also kind of want her to pin me against a wall and utterly _destroy_ my body. But what the fuck is _up_ with her, just showing up one day, out of _nowhere_ , taking a job, and then telling me she’s in love with me?! Who even does that?!”

“...” He blinked again.

“And on top of all that, how _dare she_ grow up to look like some sexy punk band frontwoman? I expected that from Illyana, not _her_. She was supposed to end up being a crazy homeless woman who yells about “the flatscans” all day! Oh god, is that classist? I think that was pretty classist. Why am I such a bitch to her? And why is she such a bitch to me? Isn’t she supposed to be _nice_ if she likes me?”

“...”

“You know what? Screw it. I’m just gonna ignore this until she comes to me about it. It’s her baggage, and if she wants to be with me, she can tell me to my face. Thanks Kurt. You were a big help!” She finished rambling, dumped her coffee into the sink, and then marched through the kitchen wall. She didn’t know what she was going to do for the day, but it certainly wouldn’t involve Sarah.

“...Marrow is back?”

*********************************************************************

Kitty stood atop the hill that overlooked the school’s baseball field. A bunch of the students had decided to hold an impromptu game, and if there was any consistent truth about Kitty Pryde, it was that she couldn’t resist a game of baseball. She was in the middle of cheering on Graymalkin as he took second base when she was greeted by the last person she wanted to deal with that day.

“How is the kitty cat today?” Sarah asked. 

Kitty whipped around and glared in Sarah’s direction as the Morlock casually strolled up to her. She had her hands jammed in her jean pockets, and she was wearing that worrying grin of her’s. 

“Not in the mood,” Kitty said with a scowl. She turned her attention back to the game, and tried to ignore the intrusion.

“Then what are you in the mood for?” Sarah teased. She hoped Kitty had gotten what was left for her, but she couldn’t be sure. She ran a hand through her hair and stood beside Kitty as the students kept on playing, totally unaware of the tension between the two adults that were watching the game.

“Fuck off, before I stick my hand through your head and scramble your brains,” Kitty threatened. “Though I doubt it’d affect you much.”

“You are suuuuuuch a bitch,” Sarah laughed. Kitty scowled even harder, and shoved Sarah back a step.

“Me? I’m the bitch?!” Kitty shouted in angry bewilderment. “You’re the one who just shows up out of nowhere and starts- Starts creeping on me! Writing me weird love letters!”

“It wasn’t a love letter.”

“...What?” Kitty asked. Her guard crashed down instantly, and the anger drained from her face, leaving only confusion.

“Wasn’t a love letter,” Sarah repeated. “If that was a love letter, it’d be about your pretty brown eyes, or your soft skin. The curls in your hair. What I wrote was a story. You wanted to know why I came back to this dump, so I told you.” 

“You came back for _me_?” Kitty asked. She didn’t know whether to feel flattered, creeped out, or both.

“Don’t get too full of yourself, kitten,” Sarah snorted. But a small opening appeared, and she rubbed at her arm, bracing herself for what she was about to say. “I came back for all of you. You guys are… You’re my family.”

A small chuckle escaped from Kitty’s lips, and she shook her head. This whole situation was just too much.

“So are you or are you not in love with me?” She asked, just to clear away any ambiguity.

To answer, Sarah reached out and grabbed a fistful of Kitty’s hair from the back of her head. She pulled Kitty in and kissed her, deep and hard and fast, and left her gasping for air. Sarah came away with the smuggest of grins. Kitty came away blushing as red as a beet and unable to form the simplest of sentences. She had never been kissed quite like that before.

“That answer the question, princess?” Sarah said, crossing her arms in front of her chest and relishing the moment. She had always wanted to do that. 

Kitty stood still for a moment as her mind ground to a halt, and after a few seconds she put a hand against the oak tree and slid to the ground. She sat down on the grass, and her eyes drifted back over to the baseball game. Sarah sat down beside her, and leaned the back of her head against the tree. They sat in silence for a few minutes, just watching the kids play, until Kitty’s head was back in working order.

“So you really missed it here, huh?” She asked, glancing at Sarah, and catching a glimpse of vulnerability on the Morlock’s face.

“Of course I did. This place was the first normal home I ever had,” Sarah admitted. She kept her eyes on the game, and prayed that she didn’t start tearing up.

“I don’t think the school really qualifies as normal,” Kitty said, noting the fact that seventy five percent of the student body didn’t even have normal human skin tones. “But… I get what you mean.”

Just then, Bling hit the ball and sent it flying across the entire field and onto the hill where Kitty and Sarah were sitting, scoring a home run. The ball rolled to a stop beside Sarah’s boot, and Kitty cheered for them while Sarah laughed. She stood up, grabbed the ball from the grass, and turned it in her hand. She brushed her thumb across the stitching and smiled softly.

“I missed _this_ ,” Sarah said happily. “Playing baseball. Swimming in the lake. Pushing you into the water…”

“You really were a bitch back in high school,” Kitty noted with a small laugh.

“So were you,” Sarah shot back with a friendly grin. She pitched the ball back down to the kids, where Sprite caught it, and play resumed. 

“Fair enough, I guess,” Kitty said as Sarah sat back down beside her. “To tell the truth, I missed all of it too. That’s why I decided to go with Logan when he left Utopia, you know? This school was a really special place, and I don’t think I can ever really leave it behind for long. All those memories keep on dragging me back.”

“Mhm.” Sarah nodded in agreement.

“What about you?” Kitty asked, turning to look directly at Sarah, who met her gaze. “Where’d you even go? You just up and vanished one day, and nobody could find you…”

Sarah recoiled from the question, and turned to look down at her knee, rather than Kitty. She could feel a new spike pushing up against the jeans, threatening to rip through soon. She’d almost rather lose another pair of pants than answer that question. But someone had told her that she needed to trust again. Much as she hated it, it was the truth.

“...I lost control. I spent so long learning how to control my powers, how to pull the bones in and look like one of the pretties… And then I fucked up.” She looked at Kitty, and she knew she was starting to cry, and she hated it. Hated being vulnerable. Hated admitting to her failures. Hated being seen so soft and weak. But she took a deep breath and pressed on. “Tore my bed to shreds in the middle of the night. Shot spikes through my windows, even the ceiling fan. It just wouldn’t stop.”

“We would’ve helped you if you had told us,” Kitty said, placing a gentle hand on Sarah’s shoulder and giving a reassuring squeeze. Sympathy was written all over her pretty face. 

“I was embarrassed,” Sarah growled. “Felt like a _failure_. And I guess I didn’t wanna risk hurting any of you by mistake. You jerks made me soft.”

“Sarah… I lost control before too,” Kitty admitted. Sarah’s head perked up slightly, and Kitty knew she was about to refute the statement, so she cut her off at the pass. “I couldn’t turn solid at all between when I was fourteen and fifteen. A full year of being intangible, unable to even sleep in my bed unless I concentrated as hard as I possibly could. Losing control happens to all of us.”

Sarah nodded, and she felt the weight on her chest lift. Trust healing pain. Of course. 

“I ended up living on my own for a while after that. Ran with some shiny organization for a bit, but it turned out they were just using me, so I left that too. Floated around for a while, until the day I woke up looking _normal_.”

“M-Day... “ Kitty gasped. She had never realized before that Sarah was one of the Mutants affected. “I’m so sorry. I know how much your mutation means to you. That must have been awful…”   
She reached out and clasped her hands around one of Sarah’s own, and saw a small, pained smile flicker onto the Morlock’s face.

“It wasn’t. Part of me always hated what I was, but I never wanted to get rid of it either. It was what made me me,” she said. She felt the tears flowing faster, and she fought back against them with a deep growl. 

“I tried being normal,” Sarah continued. “Never got the hang of it. Still, some people didn’t give a shit. Had a thing with another ex-Mutant for a while, but he split after I told him something he didn’t wanna hear.”

She considered, for a brief moment, trusting Kitty with _that_ piece of her life. The piece that she had for eight months, and then lost because of the most painful lie she ever fell for. Maybe someday. Hopefully someday. Someday she might be able to trust enough to talk about it. But not yet.

“So how’d you get your powers back?” Kitty asked, noting the bone that was now jutting out of Sarah’s right knee, and the horns on her brow.

“Made a deal with the wrong kind of Russian. Got my bones back, but I lost something more important than what I got. Signed up with X-Force to get revenge, and I got it. Even killed Cable once, but he got better,” she admitted with a laugh. That was the most satisfying thing she had done, prior to kissing Kitty. 

“Thing is, none of that filled the hole in me.” Sarah looked down at Kitty’s hands, holding her hand, and she smiled softly. “But someone got me to realize that all my problems started when I pushed away from my family, so I came back here, to see if it’d help.”

“I hope it does,” Kitty said in earnest. “As much of a weirdo nutjob as you can be, you _are_ one of us.” Kitty looked over at the students once more, and saw that their game was coming to an end. An idea popped into her head. “Tell you what, you miss the lake? Let’s run back to the school, grab our bathing suits, and go out for a swim together. I’ll even let you push me into the water,” she teased.

Sarah broke out into the worrying grin that Kitty was beginning to associate more with mischief than violence, and she rose to her feet, with Kitty following suit. 

“You’re gonna pull me in with you, ain’tcha?” Sarah asked.

“You’ll just have to find out,” Kitty said with a flirty smile. 

She ran right through Sarah, towards the mansion, and left the Morlock grinning with both hearts beating in excitement. She had a feeling that she already knew the answer.

**Author's Note:**

> Please, don't forget to kudos and comment!


End file.
